James
In this seo guide I will be telling you everything there is to now about SEO.. and just how boring it is.
When the internet first began search engines would use a variety of on page factors to gauge the quality of a website. However because in the 90s the internet was still a new thing and search engines were even newer the technology used could easily be manipulated through people keyword stuffing and spamming their pages to rank for whatever they wanted but since then technology has moved on quite a bit and these techniques simply do not work any more.
You cannot simply fool the search engines to rank your site anymore using tactics such as keyword stuffing or cloaking. This is because technology and the way search engines now analyze websites has advanced considerably.
It should be noted that even if you follow this guide and all the google guidelines.. do not expect to rank your site… as it is all luck of the draw. Getting to the top or even in a visible place on the search engines has become impossible.. and it is meant to be because google being the swines that they are have been deliberately making it impossible by penalizing every small website they can find and filling the top spots with amazon in order to force people to buy adwords.
One of the ways googles prevents apparent “low quality sites” from displaying in their search engines is by filtering out sites that are sing spam techniques with an algorithm called panda. This panda algorithm looks at a number of different on page factors to determine how useful the page is to users and if the page does not meet pandas often ridiculously high standards then that webpage will be penalized and pushed down in the google search results as a result.
One of the main aims of the panda algorithm is to determine if the website has been built for users in mnd or if the websites has been simply made for bots and to capture as much search engine traffic as possible without offering searchers anything other than spam.
To do this panda will analyze a number of on page things including:
Keyword density.
Does the webpage use a natural density of topical keywords or is it stuffed full of different keywords that users might search for in order to rank for those keywords.
Thin website or content.
Google wants to rank sites that have lots of meaty content for users to digest as these ones would be the best for their search engines. If your site just offers a few opinions 100 word opinions on the whether do not expect to rank very well however if your website is filled with lots of facts, good citations, supplementary content and you prove that your website is all about what you are trying to rank for then maybe.. just maybe you might rank.
Hidden or cloaked content.
Sometimes websites want to fool google into ranking their sites for lots of keywords and one way they used to do this wayback was stuffing the page with keywords hidden away on the page using either invisible text or something along those lines. Another cloaking technique would be to show google bot one thing and then show real users another.. don’t ask me why someone would really bother doing this but it does happen and if you are caught doing this you will be penalized.
Site design.
Google may look at your overall website design and website structure to determine if the website is structured in a way that is easy for users to navigate through. Google will nitpick at other small issues on your site such as if there are broken links on your site and other minor issues that may be annoying to users
Is your website fast? No downtime?
Everyone hates clicking on a website that is really slow loading or worse is down. That is why google does not want to rank these sites because it will just annoy their users. This means that you are going to have to put your website on a really fast and reliable host to make sure that you dont get penalized for this. If you run a mobile website making sure that your site is super fast is also important because fast load times on mobile phones is even more important than it is on desktops!
Too many ads?
Is your website superficially made just for ads or are you actually trying to help people? If your site is just stuffed to the brim full of ads for users to click this could be a sign that your website is just built for ads and not to help people and this is not the sort of website that google wants to rank. (The only site that is allowed to be stuffed full of ads and deceive its users into clicking ads is Google).
Hosted on a spam host?
Even if your site is the best website ever made if your site is hosted on a shared host with lots of spam sites on it this can actually negatively affect your site. Google has been known to totally deindex all websites on certain hosts just because there are a couple spam sites on that webhost.
Duplicate content?
Is the webpage original and unique? Simply copying content from other sites will not get your site ranking. This is because search engines are looking websites that offer something that is unique and insightful hasn’t been mentioned a gazillion times before?
Google also want to prevent scraper website from reaching the top of the results. There are a lot of scaper sites out there that go around stealing and republishing other peoples content on spam websites to solely rank for lots of keywords and to make money via ads. These websites do not offer anything of value to searchers and are sites that google and other search engines do not want ranking in their search results therefore it is only sensible that the search engines try there best to find out who is the original publisher of the content and to rank them first instead of spam scraper sites.
Panda can still be fooled!
Panda isn’t perfect that is why google does not solely use it to ran sites and uses backlinks as well.. this means that it still can be fooled. For instance spammers will often try to evade panda duplicate content penalty using techniques such as using spintax for example {Hello!|Hi!|Yo!} to change certain words in content to fool search engines further and to rank prevent duplicate content penalties. There is no evidence to suggest that search engines can identify spun content.
There is also a technique where you can get word lists and use a computer program to construct your own simple and complex sentences to produce unlimited, unique sentences… and this technique can actually work because at the end of the day google is just a computer and cannot actually read semantics like you and I can.
If you do think that you can fool google you must remeber that you will not be able to game google for long though because even if you do fool pandas algorithms you still have to fool google manual reviewers who lurk around the internet penalizing sites that do not pass googles guidelines.
Off page seo
Off page seo refers to the backlins that point to your website.. and google uses the penguin algorithm to penalize people that are doing off page seo that is outside google (stupid) guidelines. website gets penalized.
Penguin will look at all your websites backlinks…
No follow and do follow.
To google there are two types of links do folow and no follow. No-follow links are when the webmaster links out to another website but attaches a rel=”nofollow” tag onto this link that tells google that the website owner wants google to discount all link value from that weblink for some reason.
What links does googles not like?
Sponsored links should be no followed. According to google it is against googles guidelines to link out to websites without a nofollow tag that are sponsored..as if you do and google finds out your sites going to get penalized.
You must also not link out to sites in order to get them ranking higher on google… you should be linking to sites because they are useful to users and not to bump them up in the search engines. (Yes google are fascists).
Google is not actually very good at detectig paid links with penguin as many big brand still pay bloggers to to blog out about their products and to include keyword rich anchor texts to their website for seo.
User generated links.
If users can post links on your site such as on forums and blog comments then these can actually get your whole site penalized if these link have been made for seo purposes.
There is a good reason that a lot of blog platforms such as WordPress will automatically add no folow tags to blog comment links as as spammers will use automated tools such as Gsa search engine ranker and scrapebox to post tons of links everywhere they can in order of gaining lots of links from lots of different websites to boost up your rankings in the search engines.
Irrelevant links
Make sure that sites that are linking to you are relevant. If you are wanting to rank n the search engines you must show that you are a field expert.. or at least a popular choice from other people in your industry or topic. Irrelevant links are more or less worthless and even if they are dofollow you will not see much of an improvement in your rankings because of them… in fact you might actually get penalized if you have to many links from ireelavant websites as this may come across that your website is building links rather than earning them.
Links from spam sites.
If you are getting your vast majority of links from spam websites google will see this as an indication that your links aren’t natural and your site is trying to game google system.. this means you loose trust from google and your site will not be trusted from then on and google no longer cares about your website for its search results.
Google uses an algorithm called penguin to analyzes a website backlinks..which allegedly combats spam by penalizing sites that have too many spam links. if penguin determines that it has unnatural backlink profile then that
It is not just who links to you that is important in off page seo but also how people link to you as well is equally as important. Google looks at anchor text to see get clues on what your website about and what it should rank for.
Forum signatures
Forum signature links used to a be a very popular way of getting lots of links and traffic from a forum however google has now cottoned onto this technique and if the link is do follow google will try its best to penalize you because this link is not naturally created by someone who likes your site.. One of the ways google can determine if your link is a signature link is through the fact that all your links from that forum will use the same old anchor text and will be contained within a div probably with a class named forum-signature.
Footer links
Footer links are no good either. Not only do they have no context they are too abused to be considered proper links by google and because of the fact that they will destroy your anchor text diversity you are better off not having any footer links from other websites.
Private blog networks
One way spammers try to get over penguin is that is being used more and more by spammers i building private blog networks that link to their main website in order for it to rnak higher. What the spammers do is buy a expired domain from auction that already has lots of powerful links pointing to it and build a mini blog onto it and then link out to there main website. the only problem with this technique is expired domains are getting more and more expense. What s more is that the cost and time to make just private blog network site totally outweighs the benefits (if any) from making it.
To stop this google has manual reviewers who will often try to find private bog networks and deindex them (meaning you will loose a heck of a lot of money and effort).
Hacked links.
Another technique spammers use is hacking websites by finding vulnerabilities either in their server or through their content management system such as wordpress. Once they have hacked a website they will then inject link or create spam pages or redirects on that website to try and boost their own website in the serps. To further boost their effort they will also blast the hacked website with spam links relating to the keyword that they are wanting to rank for in order to fool google into thinking that they are getting links from relevant websites.. when this isnt the case at all. This is a wide spread problem and if you aren’t careful these seo hacker spammers will get hold of your precious website and try to peddle their fake ugg boots on it if they can… in order to stop them make sure your are on a secure host and that f you are using a content management system like WordPress you should always make sure that your theme and plugins are upto date and have no vulnerabilities in them.
Anchor text diversity
Penguin will look at what anchor text is being used. If all the links being sent to your site are named after the search engine term that you are trying to rank for then this is an indication that these links are being built in order to gain positions in the search engine rather than real people finding your content and liking it so they are linking to it.
If you have built lots of links to your site and then decide that your anchor text diversity isn’t natural enough and then go around changing your anchor text on all your links to something more natural.. google will notice this and will simply devalue any of the value the link had and will ever have because this activity shows to google that you control the link and thus the link is not natural and should not be counted to rank your site.
Google is instead wanting to see a diverse range of anchor text being used that is natural and how real people would link to a site. If you aren’t building links you shouldn’t be too worried about anchor text diversity because if you do get people linking to you it will be natural because it will be other people.
If you are now worried about getting penalized in google because you have been doing all of the above. The you can always try out googles disavow tool n googles webmaster tools.
Negative seo.
Since google released penguin to punish sites, negative seo has become a real thing. Google doesn’t care though
Negative seo is when some start building tons of spam links to your site to deliberately get google to penalize it. They can do this buy going to places like Fivver and buying gigs or using automated software to create links that wll hit a site with thousands of spam links on thousands of different domains maing disavowing impossible and a penalty in some form highly likely. There really isn’t much to stop anyone from destroying any small website on google that has not got that many links to begin with. For larger sites with lots of high authority links it will would be a bit trickier and would require a prolonged negative seo attack over several months or years until a penalty kicks them out of google.
It also has to be said that it is possible to penalize a site in google without even building links.. as you can invoke a panda duplicate penalty if you simply copy all a sites content and re-post it on thousands of spam websites.
Conclusion
Seo is an extremely boring subject.. and the rules and googles guidelines are constantly changing as what you were allowed to do a couple years ago your no longer allowed to even think about doing. At the end of the day all it is is just sucking up to an evil mega cooperation who have a monopoly over internet search in the hope that they do not destroy your business for what ever excuse they make up, because even though google says that all these changes are to combat spam there is a heck of a lot of collateral damage which is mostly small businesses being penalized and sent to the internet abyss for small issues. I cannot help but think that google intends for this to happen so that these small businesses are forced to buy adwords for extortionate prices in order to just be seen on the internet because ranking on google is way to hard.
Ps, This article took me a long time to write for on thebosh please don’t copy it or anything like that.
